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Monday, 21 July 2014

Sweet Secrets: Triple Chocolate Cookies

I used to bake like a madwoman. No, seriously. When my brother turned 18, I made no fewer than nine cakes for his party. Yes. Nine cakes. Plus sweet snacks -- including my now infamous cupcakes, which is almost a literal death by chocolate. I had spent two days mixing and baking and cooling and icing -- it was a mammoth effort! These days, I don't usually have much time to experiment in the kitchen, but I've been on holidays for about a month, so I've tried hard to try and fatten up my family! After baking batch after batch of failed yet delicious brownies, I turned to a biscuit recipe for something essentially the same yet somewhat different. The fact that I felt guilty about pinching and eating my brother's biscuits had nooothing to do with it.

So what exactly is a biscuit? In the US, they're called "cookies" -- in the UK, they're still "biscuits". We also use the term interchangeably with certain kinds of crackers; the flavoured kind, usually, such as Shapes. Finding out the cultural differences between what are biscuits and crackers and scones and cookies is a conversation that can go on for hours, literally -- I know, I once had a sad, sad conversation that lasted that long.

The website I found this recipe on, called The Pioneer Woman Cooks, calls these biscuits "Chocolate Chocolate White Chocolate Chip Cookies". That sounds like an overkill of chocolate to me, and it's meant to be. She strongly suggests drinking a tall, cold glass of low-fat milk with it -- because full cream would be too decadent and skim milk just doesn't cut it! I have to say, I can definitely see how she came to that conclusion. Feeling sick never felt so good.

This recipe is super easy but converting some of the measurements to Australian metric can be bamboozling, especially to those who aren't so confident in the kitchen. The first step is to cream together the butter and the sugar -- but how much butter to do you need for two and a half sticks? It's about 275g -- just a little more than your average block.

Mix it up nice and good.

Then you mix in the eggs, one by one. Egg. Mix. Egg. Mix. Egg. Mix. Simple enough stuff.

Then sift together all of your dry ingredients!

Add the dry ingredients to the butter-sugar-egg mix, a bit at a time...

...then dump all of your chocolate in!

The recipe says to add 1 1/2 cups chocolate chips and two cups of white chocolate chips. I do believe that's a lot of chocolate, but I tend to ignore such instructions and just dump my own quantity in! In this case, it was a single 230g packet of Cadbury Milk Chocolate Baking Chips, then chopped up 220g of Cadbury Cooking White Chocolate. Doing so sounds super tedious, but it's pretty easy: break the up all the squares individually, then take a sharp knife -- like a steak knife, I guess -- and chop each square into rough quarters. This way, you'll have nice huge chunks of chocolate, and we all know what that means -- deliciously ugly biscuits!

Mix that mix with the chocolate chips, and do it with style! Shimmy, samba, boogie! Okay, so nobody's said the word "boogie" since the 80s, but you'll want to start working off the calories before you eat these! Trust me, this recipe practically makes me a professional.

Line an oven tray with baking paper and start doling out doses of cookie. The recipe said that it would yield three dozen biscuits and naturally I was sceptical -- but it did! I had three of these beauties ready to go, although to ensure perfect deliciousness, I baked one tray at a time, for about ten minutes. This really is all you need. The biscuits might seem far too soft when you take them out of the oven, and while there's nothing wrong with cooking them for an extra five minutes, this does result in a crispy, crunchy bikkie. I like mine soft, personally.

Ten minutes later and voila! I've got a deliciously warm batch of soft cookies. I'm not going to lie, I ate the three that were in my first photo (because, hey, why not?), and I was so thankful for the milk, even though it was full cream (go hard or go home!). I swore myself off chocolate for about three hours afterwards -- that obviously didn't last.

Minus the three I ate very quickly, I made three dozen of these delicious morsels and they were all gone within twenty-four hours. Three dozen biscuits in less than a day! What kind of family does that? It's obviously a testimony to just how good these biscuits. Soft, warm, delicious -- they are the perfect kind of sweet winter warmer that we need right now.

You can read the original recipe herebut I've included a tweaked version below. The original mentions something called a "cookie scoop", and when I read that I was like, "Whaaaat?" We don't have those in Australia as far as I know, so hopefully this recipe will help quash any confusion!

Triple Chocolate Cookies

Makes 36 biscuits

Ingredients

275g butter, softened

2 cups sugar

2 eggs

3 tsp. vanilla extract

2 cups flour

3/4 cups cocoa powder

1 1/2 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. salt

230g bag Cadbury milk chocolate chips

220g block Cadbury white cooking chocolate.

Method

Preheat the oven to 180C / 350F.

Break the white cooking chocolate into squares; roughly cut each square into quarters.

Cream the butter and sugar with an electric mixer until fluffy, scraping down the sides with a spatula.

Add the eggs one at a time, mixing after each addition. Mix in the vanilla.

Sift together the dry ingredients, then add in batches to the flour, mixing until just combined after each addition.

Gently fold in the chocolate chips and the chopped white chocolate.

Add 1 tbsp. portions of mix onto oven trays lined with baking paper. Bake for 10 minutes, or until the biscuits are just done but still soft and chewy.

I'm not sure how well margarine works in place of butter, but I'm sure it'll taste delicious whatever you use, so let me know how it works out!

And I am ALL OVER those brownies! (I don't know why, but I read the article with a deep, smooth man's voice in my head?) I tend to fail at brownies, but if this lot happens to work out then they'll go head-to-head with another delicious brownie recipe I have.